Driving Experiment System Using HMDs to Measure Drivers’ Proficiency and Difficulty of Various Road Conditions

Car navigation systems typically calculate recommended routes on the basis of geographical factors and status of congestion. Such systems do not account for the user’s driving skill or the difficulty of certain maneuvers (e.g., turning) or driving on different types of roads (e.g., narrow roads). This may result in problems for drivers, particularly beginners, when driving on a route recommended by the system. To develop a navigation system that takes these factors into account, we apply a performance model of GUI operation to driving operations and investigate a method of modeling driving difficulty, such as road conditions. In this study, we implemented an HMD-based driving experiment system to model drivers’ behaviors. We also conducted an experiment to clarify the usefulness of our system and showed that our system could judge the driver’s proficiency using the steering wheel operation in the driving trajectory of curves.